REBOL DEMO CONTEST

Great! RDC 2005! Write best graphical demo in REBOL, fit it in 32 768 bytes and you can win:

1. iPod Video
2. XBox360 (or Mac Mini)
3. SDK or Command license (1st and 2nd too)

Isn't it great? Everybody's probably working on a demo now as deadline is on December 31st, 11:59:59 GMT. Submit your demos using dedicated web page (wait a moment, there's no such a web page still and the deadline is less than two weeks away!) and then wait.

And if you're waiting you can wait for Core 2.6.3 which is comming in January 2006. Together with View 1.3.3? Who knows. But we can hope.

So don't expect many new blogs till new year, as I'm trying to win iPod or XBox ;)

Mail file sharing

Because I'm writing scripts on more than one computer I need to sync files somehow. I can use flashdisk for synchronization, but USB is not always available or I forget my flashdisk at home, so it's not always the right option.
Or I can use ftp to upload and download files. But at the end I've got lots of different directories with different versions, because I have no intelligent file structure.
I was inspired by Google filesystems for win and lin so I decided to use some freemail (gmail preferably) for my scripts maintaing. Unfortunatly, Gmail needs some authentication, SSL or what and SSL under REBOL needs Command and Command needs 350$ to buy.
So I found another freemail provider that offers both non-authenticated SMPT and POP and therefore is OK for REBOL (btw. remeber the old REBOL example? send [luke]@[rebol].[com] read http://www.rebol.com ? Hard to do with all the authetications required today.) and I started coding.

The result is a small application called %rspace.r that can upload file to repository, download newest version from repository, or you can get list of all files in repository and finally, if you're happy with your script, you can publish it on www/ftp. All this with documentation in less than 6kB.
All you need is REBOL and mail account cappable of SMTP/POP without authentication. It's good to have an FTP account for publishing files but that's not required. If you do not have an mail account, I've set up one on seznam.cz, user 'rebolspace' and pass 'spacerebol' for testing this application (it's built in, so you can start testing right after download).

Remember, it's just alpha, does not have many features, but it works, I can write something here, update it there and have all the versions accesible from everywhere. It's written for REBOL scripts so with big projects it's going to be very slow and unusable, but for small project (and most REBOL scripts are really small) it's probably good.

So download it form http://krutek.info/rebol/rspace.r (stable) or http://rebolspace.sweb.cz/rspace.r (latest published version).

WARNING: because [rebolspace]@[seznam].[cz] is open account it won't be wise to use it ordinarily. Please, if you like it, set up your own account and use it instead of built-in one.
And remember: all suggestions and fixes are welcome.

Convole

I wrote there are probably no new features in View 1.3.2 . That's not true, there's new effect - convolve. It's a standard covolution matrix that can be applied on face as any other effect. Usage is following:


view layout [
image http://krutek.info/pix/fotky/roland.jpg effect [
convolve [
-1 0 0
0 1 0
0 0 0
] 0 128 true
]
]

Format of convolve is:

matrix [block!] divisor [number!] offset [number!] preprocess-grayscale [logic!]

There were rumours for long time that convolve is already part of View, but only internally without user-interface, despite this being true, convolve is finally official part of View and that's great. So let's look more suprises hidden in this new release! :))

SDK 2.6.2 released!

Gabriele said yesterday, that new SDK should be out "very soon". I didn't thought he was talking not in days but in hours :) So it's out, with >50 bugs fixed (still no change-log but it surely comes later). Anything new? As I supposed, no. We have to wait for 1.4.0 .And, there won't be new betas, because "everybody was in favour of this idea". Erhm, me not, I like betas. But View 1.3.2 is out and that's good. RT still has to change their web pages to reflect it everywhere, because thy still offer 1.3.1 as newest version.

1.3.2 should be out very soon.

Said Gabriele on AltMe. If you look at RAMBO, there's cca. 40 fixed bugs for View 1.3.2/Core 2.6.2 .
So what can we expect in 1.3.2 ?

rebcode - no. It's not secure now, should be part of 1.4

rebservices - don't know. Maybe client/server will be part of 1.3.2 . That should be great addition.

new datatypes - probably not. You can find unicode! , rebcode! and vector! in recent alphas, but they'll be probably removed.

rich text - there was no alpha demo so I think it has to wait for 1.4.

And what is expected release date of 1.4? Nobody knows.

Two news.

I've got two news. One good and one bad. First the good one.

Graham Chiu has released his Synapse EMR

From the announcement:


Graham's EMR is a free powerful multi-user electronic medical records
system that uses the open source RDBMS Firebird.

* Multi-user across LANs and the Internet.
* No installation or registry changes.
* Small client and server footprint.
* Rich GUI client.
* Encrypted network traffic.
* Unlimited number of patients and staff.
* Tablet PC friendly.
* Image friendly - include images and drawings in your consults
* Medication Database Included.
* Read codes included.
* Easy Custom Form creation
* Paper management - store scanned documents
* MS Word integration
* LaTeX integration


And now the bad one. Carl is thinking about not releasing beta-versions. Sad, sad, sad.